A general 'moral compass' is not a good predictor of behaviour
Animal lovers who eat meat, caring citizens who do not follow Covid-19 rules and big-hearted people who do not volunteer. What is up with that? TPM scientists Tom van den Berg, Maarten Kroesen and Caspar Chorus (faculty of IDE) investigated how individuals' general moral values influence their behaviour. They show that context is so relevant that a person's general moral beliefs are not good predictors of their behaviour. They published about it in Frontiers in Psychology.
Within moral psychology, theories such as Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) are used to predict what behaviour people will exhibit based on general moral values. 'Within this methodology, people rate which values they consider important, such as caring, loyalty, justice. It is a popular way to measure morality in various fields of science’, says Van den Berg. There has long been debate within psychology whether this way of measuring with general scales gives a correct picture. Van den Berg, trained as a criminologist and philosopher, also had doubts about whether this is the right method to measure morality. After all, what does a general moral value really say about behaviour in practice? He decided to do research into it with fellow scientists.
They explored the relationship between general moral values and behaviour in everyday life through a conceptual analysis and an empirical study. The research shows that the influence of a commonly endorsed moral value on moral behaviour is highly context-dependent.
Morality and Covid behaviour
Among other things, Van den Berg conducted empirical research with MFT on Covid behaviour, such as personal hygiene, keeping a distance from each other and not visiting vulnerable people. For example, respondents were asked to what extent they frequently washed their hands and used paper towels to dry their hands. They were also asked about their values. How important do they consider justice, following an authority, being loyal to a group? These moral values were linked to these behaviours. Overall, the effects found were extremely low (almost all below 0.1) and most were not significant. Where a result of 0.1 means that moral value can explain only 1 per cent of the variation in behaviour. You can then draw wrong conclusions and think that morality plays no role in Covid behaviour. The only problem is that the role of morality within this context and the specific influence it has on behaviour has not been properly measured in this way.
Moral decision model
To make this clear, Van den Berg applied Rest's moral decision model in his research. Before morality affects behaviour, you go through four stages. First, one must be aware of the moral relevance of a decision, action and its implications. In the second stage, one makes a moral judgement by deciding which are the 'right' courses of action and which are the 'wrong' ones. Then you decide what action you want to take (moral intention). Only after this decision follows the fourth stage: converting the intention into behaviour. Van den Berg: 'In each of these phases, the context plays a role in which moral value becomes important. For example do you think justice is the most important value in each context? This probably varies from situation to situation. And what is the social norm? If your friends are there, you might react differently, and in the fourth phase, whether or not you have the means to adjust your behaviour also plays a role. This becomes clear in the current energy crisis: you have the intention to save energy, but no money to take energy-saving measures. The moral value is present, but is not expressed in behaviour because of the context.'
Call for more dynamic research in moral psychology
Moral decision-making depends on context. This means that measurements to calculate the relationship between morality and behaviour are often limited if context is not included. The fact that correlations are often low and not significant with theories like MFT does not mean that morality does not play a role in behaviour. 'That is too short sighted. There is a risk of drawing wrong conclusions because this theory itself does not provide sufficient insight into this. We therefore advocate carrying out qualitative research alongside this type of quantitative theory, that takes into account the social context and better reveals the specific role of morality with regard to behaviour. In the old way of working, with general moral values, this is ignored. Therefore it predicts behaviour less well.' For policymakers, this means that if you want to steer behaviour by means of a moral appeal, it will only work if you address people via specific moral considerations instead of a general call for more norms and values or more 'respect'.